TURNSTILE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Real Thing

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 9-14, 25-31 and 57-62, and 1 more place -- 36.1% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
170 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
72
LENGTH
1:42
DIFFICULTY
51/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 170 BPM
REAL THING · BAR 9

It is played on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 19 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is how often it moves around the kit.

The whole song is 51 out of 100, so the beat is not the hard part: what costs you is everything around it, the joins and the fills.

How to get it under your hands

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 128 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 3 of them. Nothing is a matter of opinion: each rung has a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next one.

  1. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, hi-hat pulled back to quarter notes. This is the part to know by heart.
  2. Every note, flat. All the notes, but the hi-hat stays closed and nothing is ghosted or accented.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 128, 149 and 170 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.

PRACTISE THIS BEAT →

Questions

What drum beat does Real Thing use?

A one-bar groove on crash, hi-hat, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 170 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 36.1% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 9-14, 25-31, 57-62 and 65-71. The time is kept on the toms to start with, and it changes 8 times over the song.

Is the beat in Real Thing hard?

19 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 51 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 72 BARS ANALYSED